What to do without a Start Button

What to do without a Start Button

As a user of a Windows PC you've likely gotten used to clicking on the Start button to use its menu to go to Programs and, from that cascading menu, launching the program you want to use.

The Macintosh has no Start button on the Task Bar across the bottom of the screen.

Here are two methods to launch an application on the Mac:

First Method: Activity 1: Hunting up an Application Program

1) Double-click on the icon of the hard drive (usually in the upper right of the desktop). Here's an example of what a hard drive icon might look like:

2) This will open a directory window showing the contents of the hard drive: Note that your particular Mac may differ from the screen shot below! But it may look something like this:

2) Open the Application folder icon and look for an icon named SimpleText. This will open a document window where you can type. (SimpleText is an elementary word processing program.)

You've opened an application!

We'll use SimpleText later to create and save a document.

A cool trick to open programs

Here's a quick way to open programs that have recently been opened.

1) Call down the Apple Menu (the Apple symbol in the upper left of the menu bar at the top of the screen:

2) One of the menu items in the Apple Menu is Recent Applications. This is a cascading menu and if you highlight any of the items in that cascading menu and click the mouse you'll launch that program. That looks like this:

 

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